Greg Scott Brown Aquaman For starters, he breathed underwater. That would have come in handy the summer I was expected to sink into the grimy abyss of the Municipal Pool. Instead, I could not breach the surface, could not plunge my high-strung head beneath, so full of the dread of drowning. Me, and legions of kids called Tadpoles. * Aquaman, created by men to teach boys about men, had nothing on the simpering girl with viridescent hair who needed me to stay below the water-line, to be a good soldier, to suck it up, and to tread the briny like a motherfucker. Of course, she had no cinder-block pecs, no glitzy, greenorange formfitting manwrapper straight out of pro-wrestling by way of the Ballets Russes. And did I mention? Aquaman could hold his breath. Or no. Not hold it. Not need to hold it. Like my uncle, who, the family claimed, could submerge six minutes or some unfathomable eternity. A real man, surely—his furry, sea-lion trunk bobbing along the lapis veneer of a Holiday Inn pool, martini held aloft. Or, like Dirk, the young man charged with the Tadpoles' salvation. * Dirk Davenport was older bigger hairier than me, and reeked of Vitalis and Hai Karate, even soaking wet. A dark Speedo hung below his narrow waist— a kind of censor's black bar, riveting attention to what it concealed. Never flinching from a dive into the stinging pool (the Tadpoles said it smelled of jizz) Dirk flourished in the chlorinated depths like some outlandish strain of coral no landlubber could ever contrive. I loved Dirk Davenport because he could swim, could propel his glorious, Utopian frame from one rough edge of the pool to the other without a whiff of despair. That whole summer long, while Dirk breezily traversed the murk of masculinity, all the other useless boys and I were cast like chum into public pools for our own good— everything suspended in the pitiless blue.

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